Thursday, June 23, 2011

In the beginning, I thought being able to get pregnant was something that all women could achieve. I naively thought that once Mark and I got married, we would be able to have a child within the year. I mean the media is full of stories about 16year olds giving birth in bathroom stalls and a huge majority of people I know have children. It's been around since the beginning of time, so how hard could it really be?

I quickly found out the answer to that question...it can be damn hard. Although I got pregnant within four months of getting married, that pregnancy resulted in a miscarriage. That was one of the most devastating days in my entire life. To have a life inside of you vanish is something that I wish upon no one. I have never been able to find the right words to describe how painful it is, but when people say they feel as though their heart has been ripped out of their chest, I feel that is a close comparison. It is also something that unless you have been through yourself, you really can't comprehend how debilitating it is.

Over the next three and a half years, I had two more miscarriages. With each one, my hope of having a child died even more. I became resentful of every pregnant woman I encountered, whether I knew her or not. I would cry whenever a friend announced their pregnancy, ashamed that I couldn't be happy for them like a friend should be. But, what was worse was that I lost hope that having a family would ever happen for me.

I became obsessed with monitoring my ovulation patterns and planning sex to occur in those few precious days. You only have 12 chances a year to conceive...12!!! That really isn't a lot and it puts a lot of pressure on you to make something magical happen during those fleeting moments of fertility. This is what my life turned into...a hunt, no a chase, to have a baby.

Some of you might be thinking, well why didn't you just adopt? We seriously thought about it and I spent more time than I would ever like to admit researching places to adopt through. Mark and I had decided before we even got married that if for some god forsaken reason we were unable to have children, that we would definitely adopt. However, it is a hard decision to make to give up on your ability to bear children. This is suppose to be the primary role of a woman and to admit that I was unable to do it was extremely hard.

After 3 and a half years of tyring, we decided that we would try one last doctor's visit and then would adopt a child if nothing resulted from that last ditched effort of hope. That was before Birdie died.